October 31, 2011

A clever iPad-based Halloween costume

“NASA engineer Mark Rober,” writes CNET, “used some red sauce and two iPad 2s in order to pretend, at whatever Halloween convention he might be attending, that he has a vast, open, and bloody wound through the core of his torso.” Nice:

I was just telling our 3-year-old Finn that a kid we know dressed up as an iPod a few years ago. Finn looked at me blankly until I said, “er, iPhone–he dressed as an iPhone.” (“iPod” may as well have been “phonograph” in his little world view.)

October 24, 2011

Saturday: iPad Photo Workflow & Portfolio Design

If you’ll happen to be in New York on Saturday, check out this session at PhotoPlus (8:45-11:45 AM) from our friends Dan Marcolina & Matthew Richmond.

Dan plans to deconstruct some of his favorite interactive photo experiences including “World Without Photoshop” and the “iObsessed Companion“. He’ll show you how to create a portfolio for the App store by using Adobe Indesign and the new Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. (Here’s their iPad portfolio, Printeractivideo.) He’ll also explain the cross devices benefits of authoring with the unique, in the cloud, toolset called SlideRocket. As a bonus he’ll share some insights from producing the Book iPhone Obsessed, photo editing experiments with apps that includes the use QR Codes for triggering mobile formatted portfolios of work.

Research: Auto-selecting good stills from a video

A couple of years ago, Esquire shot a magazine cover using not a still camera but a high-res RED video camera. What was groundbreaking becomes commonplace, and as video capture resolution increases, so does the possibility of using stills as photos.

October 18, 2011

iOS 5 for tots: Quick pro/con

I want Robert Shaw from Jaws to describe my morning as he would a shark attack: “Up comes a reminder on the iPad and the Netflix stops streamin’, and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’…” Yeah, it got ugly. (Sorry, other conference call participants.)

Good news, though: You can now go into Settings->Notifications, find the Calendar app, and set the notification type from Alert (which interrupts the video) to Banner. Now our guys can watch their morning Mighty Machines without going ballistic when it pauses.

On the downside, here’s an intriguing little bit of usability research: Finn is often generating four-finger “swipes” (new in iOS 5 for switching apps) when simply trying to drag on the screen. While coloring in lines in the aforementioned Harold, he’d push hard and his little knuckles would register as multitouch swipes. Thus he’d start switching apps, bringing up the list of apps, etc. Who knew?

As always, I pine for Apple to introduce multi-user support in iOS. Now in the kids’ profile I’ll add “disabling global swipe gestures” to “making it harder to exit the app via the Home button,” “disallow scary stuff on YouTube,” etc.

Update: Double who-knew: BubCap home button covers “are just rigid enough to keep toddlers from pressing the home button, yet flexible enough that adults can activate the button with a firm push.” [Via Iván Cavero Belaunde]

A beautifully simple iPad app for kids

The Micronaxx (ages 3.5 & 2) spent the weekend transfixed by Harold & the Purple Crayon, a narrated version of the classic children’s book. I’ve previously shied away from elaborate, high-concept kids book-apps, figuring they distract instead of encouraging imagination. In this case, though, simplicity is key, and the lovely hidden little treats (e.g. a little crab that pops out of the sand, or–yes–a burping porcupine) are delightful.

Eye-popping tech for inserting 3D objects into photos

“With a single image and a small amount of annotation,” writes researcher Kevin Karsch, “our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects.” Fascinating:

October 17, 2011

Adobe demos amazing deblurring tech (new video)

Last week over a million people (!) watched a handheld recording of this demo. Here’s a far clearer version*:

And here’s a before/after image (click for higher resolution):

Now, here’s the thing: This is just a technology demo, not a pre-announced feature. It’s very exciting, but much hard work remains to be done. Check out details right from the researchers via the Photsohop.com team blog. [Update: Yes, it’s real. See the researchers’ update at the bottom of the post.]

October 16, 2011

The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.

New Wacom tablets add wireless, multitouch

The new Capture ($100) and Create ($200) models offer multitouch input, and you can add wireless connectivity for an extra $40. Neat. (And those prices are quite a deal, considering that they include a copy of Photoshop Elements.)

October 13, 2011

Photoshop Touch: Easily fade images together

While building Photoshop Touch, we’ve constantly sought to balance simplicity & power. For this release, we opted not to include Photoshop-style layer masks (powerful, but not exactly trivial to understand). Instead we incorporated what we think is a simpler, more direct way to achieve a common use of masking. In this short video Russell Brown demonstrates the Add Fade command:

Photoshop User Group talks video, Tuesday in SJ

Michael Lewis is a Quality Assurance Engineer at Adobe Systems, Inc. He is currently a member of the Adobe Premiere Pro team, but began his career at Adobe on the Adobe Photoshop team. While he enjoys working for a company that is continually at the forefront of digital imaging, he can still be found on weekends shooting with his favorite Super 8mm film camera.

Daniel Brown worked for Adobe Systems Inc. in the role of “Senior Evangelist” on the Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects teams applying his experience “in the trenches” to product development, demonstrations, and communication with customers at industry events worldwide.In 2001, Daniel got his first taste of both diving and, simultaneously, underwater photography and has been hooked ever since. He’s been a lecturer at numerous Digital Shootout events and regularly contributes to Stephen Frink’s week-long “Digital Immersion” classes in Key Largo, Florida.

Friday demo/Q&A: Perspective drawing in Illustrator CS5

Whether you are drawing street scenes, architecture, product concepts, packaging, or even infographics, being able to craft art in perspective consistently, and accurately, is a must-have skill. In this session we’ll learn how Illustrator CS5 makes this possible with the new Perspective Drawing tools. Learn how to map 2D vector art to existing perspectives, draw in perspective, and get the skinny on some tricks to help you work.

October 11, 2011

Lightroom 50% off, today only

CSS shaders: Hell yeah.

“Flash’ll be dead soon,” I thought. “Web browsers will add animation support, plus live filters, and let me mix it all together on a page.”

That was back in 1999.

HTML animation is progressing, but it still lacks much of the richness that Flash Player can provide. So, what can we do about it?

Adobe’s contributing technology & expertise to enable CSS shaders. CSS shaders “define a filter effects extensibility mechanism and provide rich, easily animated visual effects to all HTML5 content.” They work particularly well with CSS animations and CSS transitions, but they even work on video & SVG animations. Check it out:

So, yeah: Adobe’s using Flash-derived technology to make HTML5 more competitive with Flash.

Crazy, right? Not at all: this increases your ability to present visually rich experiences, and that increases Adobe’s ability to sell you tools for creating those experiences. The different playback technologies are just means to those ends.

Adobe has collaborated with Apple & Opera and has now submitted the spec to the W3C. The code is checked into WebKit under consideration for inclusion in WebKit, with this demo recorded using a build of Chromium. In addition Microsoft has added support for SVG filters in the IE10 platform preview. [Update: IE10 supports SVG filters, but it doesn’t support Filter Effects on HTML or CSS shaders.] For details, sample code, etc., check out this post from Vincent Hardy.

October 09, 2011

The first digital 3D-rendered film, c1972

October 08, 2011

Video: Tactile 3D technology

RePro3D, writes Engadget, combines “a glasses-free 3D display with an infrared tactile interface, they are able to create a holographic model that responds when ‘touched.’ The next step for the team is to provide feedback via a wearable device, adding the sensation of touch.” Check it out:

October 07, 2011

Download b3 of Adobe’s HTML5 animation tool, Edge

Preview 3 introduces interactivity capabilities for Edge, the most requested functionality thus far. The first set of interactivity features include looping, hyperlinks, access to the Edge animation framework API, and the ability to handle HTML DOM events – all within Edge.

Actions — The core of Edge’s interactivity capabilities, Actions are functions that can be added to handle a single event.

The Actions Editor uses a popup interface that lets you enter JavaScript code for a function.

A built-in code snippet library is available for commonly used functions like go to, stop, hyperlink, etc.

Add your own JavaScript code to add new flexibility to your compositions.

Where actions can be attached:

Elements to handle click events

Stage to access composition-level events such as “loaded”

Timeline to access playback events such as “complete”

Triggers to allow time-based actions to be applied in the timeline

Objects other than triggers allow you to select multiple events you wish to handle, each with its own action.

Labels — Insert labels on the timeline as reference points in your code, to enable functionality like playing or seeking to that point in the timeline.

See Adobe Labs for a list of additional enhancements, and to give your feedback as the app progresses.

October 06, 2011

The Photoshop Team Remembers Steve Jobs

Dreams deferred, and realized.

I dreamt all last night, as I have many previous nights, about hanging out with Steve Jobs. As usual it was fascinating, combative, funny, and enlightening. As usual I wish I could remember more details. And as usual, I woke up, and it was just a dream.

I never did get to meet Steve. I’d see him in the grocery store or at a conference, but I never wanted to bother him. I thought I might meet him at the D3 conference, but no joy, and I made this little self-deprecating graphic to amuse my wife & friend (click to enlarge):

So it goes.

To all us perfectionists–would-be “unreasonable men”–Steve’s example was a beacon: it said that sweating “the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill [1]” would matter. People would care.

When OS X 10.4 was announced, some Mac engineers visited Adobe to show the new features. One pointed at Dashboard’s analog-style clock: “Do you have any idea how hard it was,” he asked, “to make the quartz movement of the second hand measure up to Steve’s standard??”

Ironically, it was Steve’s example that caused me to pass on joining Apple. Back in ’06 Intel-based Macs had just shipped, and Mac customers were stuck with Photoshop running slowly in emulation mode. I spent all summer waging a crazy, unreasonable battle to launch the first (and so far only) public beta of Photoshop, bringing native performance to hundreds of thousands of Mac customers six months earlier than we could have otherwise. Yeah, working at Apple sounded great, but nothing was more important than seeing our mission through. The Photoshop team was willing to be crazy ones, and I couldn’t walk away from them. It remains my proudest achievement here.

I’ll close with the one mail I ever got from Steve. During the whole Flash/iPad controversy last year, many at Adobe questioned the wisdom of building iPad apps, or whether we’d even be allowed to ship them. I opted to bypass the bureaucracy & just ask the man himself. He replied,

“We’d love some kick-ass Adobe apps on the iPad… Hope this helps.”

It very much did, and I promised we would. The best tribute, the best thank-you I can devise for a great creator is to go out and create.

The Lightroom team on Steve & the Mac

Photoshop was invented on the Mac. The Mac is a key development platform for the entire digital imaging team, particularly Lightroom that was first launched at Macworld. Steve Jobs was a visionary who inspired tech innovation. We are grateful for his contributions and sorry for this loss. – The Lightroom Team

Adobe’s founders remember Steve Jobs

“We met Steve Jobs about 3 months after we started Adobe. He called us and said: ‘I hear you guys are doing great things – can we meet?’ He came over to our tiny office in Mountain View and saw the early stages of PostScript. He got the concept immediately and we started about 5 months of negotiations over our first contract. Apple invested $2.5 million into Adobe and gave us an advance on royalties. This allowed us to help Apple build the first LaserWriter. Without Steve’s vision and incredible willingness to take risk, Adobe would not be what it is today. We owe an enormous debt to Steve and his vision.

“We have always had great admiration and respect for Steve. The world is a better place because of him, and his absence will leave a huge hole in the world of technology.”

“Steve was a unique visionary and his influence as a technology innovator will be sorely missed. This is a sad day for the entire industry, and we offer our deepest sympathy to his family.”— Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe Systems

LayerVault: “Simple version control for designers”

The service promises simple cloud backup & versioning of PSDs & other formats:

If the LayerVault guys can crack this particular nut, God bless ‘em. Years ago Adobe Version Cue tried integrating check-in & versioning into Creative Suite apps, but designers didn’t bite. Later GridIron Flow arrived with what I thought was brilliant auto-versioning, but I haven’t seen it get wide adoption. It’s just hard to move people beyond the dirt-simple “final,” “finalfinal,” “finalfinal02,” approach they’ve used for 20+ years.

October 05, 2011

Video: Image search in Photoshop Touch

“Grab two images, cut the background off one, and blend the results.” If I had to boil Photoshop Touch down to one capability or scenario, it’s that.

Acquiring images is therefore critical. That’s why we made it simple to drag & drop in images from Facebook, Creative Cloud, and even Google Images. Here Russell Brown composites some public-domain NASA imagery using different blending modes:

We want to help customers do the right thing (i.e. not rip off others’ work), so we paid particular attention to making it easy to search only for images that have been tagged for reuse. By default PS Touch limits search results to those creators have marked as okay to use.

[By the way, I’m still in LA, working the MAX show all day. I’ll get busy answering PS Touch-related questions when I get home.]

“What’s up, geeks?”

October 04, 2011

Video: Camera Fill in Photoshop Touch

In building Photoshop Touch we didn’t want to just rehash Photoshop’s feature set; rather, we wanted to take unique advantage of what tablets can do. Photoshop Touch can feed a live stream from your camera into your layer stack (think “PSD layer from camera”):

This brief demo doesn’t show it, but the camera feed will respect the blending mode & opacity of the target layer, and it’ll be clipped to whatever selection is active (for example, select someone’s face using a soft-edged elliptical marquee, then live-fill it with what the camera sees).

October 03, 2011

Introducing Photoshop Touch

Combine, Edit, Share. I’m delighted to introduce Adobe Photoshop Touch, a new tablet app for creative imaging. With PS Touch we’re bringing Photoshop fun & power not only to new platforms, but to a whole new audience.

Here’s my brief overview:

To see the app in action, check out Russell Brown’s 10-minute feature tour:

So, when can you get it, and what does it cost?

We plan to release Photoshop Touch for Android shortly, after which we plan to bring it to iOS. When we talk about reaching new audiences, we’re not kidding: Photoshop Touch is priced at just $9.99.

So (to anticipate an inevitable question), why Android first? Many Adobe apps (Adobe Carousel, Ideas, Photoshop Express, Eazel, Color Lava, Nav) have already been released on iOS first, and it’s good to support customers across platforms. We’re busily coding for iOS as well, so I wouldn’t make too much of this particular detail. No matter what tablet(s) you use, we can’t wait to get Photoshop Touch into your hands.

One last thought for now: We’re still very, very early in the evolution of mobile devices for creative work, and Photoshop Touch–along with the many other Adobe touch apps announced today–is just a beginning. We’re eager to hear what you think, and I’m looking forward to hearing ideas & questions here and on Twitter (@PhotoshopTouch). (Today I’ll be largely offline, showing the app in person at Adobe MAX, so I apologize in advance if I’m slow to respond.)

Join us as we explore the best solutions for delivering highly expressive and usable experiences, both in the browser and as apps. We’ll look at a variety of technologies and products, highlighting current opportunities, and peering into the not-so-distant future.